Carl Andre’s “Stone Field Sculpture”

36 Rocks Sitting on the Triangularish Lawn on Gold Street Near Main “Stone Field” Sculpture, Hartford 2015 Update: Construction on Gold Street prompted utilities worker to spray paint the rocks. Guess they didn’t think/realize this was an art installation.

Art. It means different things to different people. Hartford has a rather, um, unique installation right next to the historic “Ancient Burying Grounds” cemetery and across the street from the Wadsworth Atheneum; 36 rocks sitting on the triangularish lawn on Gold Street near Main Street.

What makes this field of stones interesting enough for me to take a picture of it and write about it is the massive public outcry that greeted its unveiling. Hartford denizens and writers still talk about it; marking anniversaries with biting editorials and sarcastic blurbs.

Carl Andre was (and is) an “important” artist and sculptor. So Hartford apparently had $87,000 to throw around back in 1977 and decided to commission him for an installation. He accepted and Hartford got… Yup, 36 rocks sitting on the triangularish lawn on Gold Street near Main.

The BBC seems to be enamored with Mr. Andre… “Andre’s sculptures tend to involve simple elements – bricks, for example, or stones – arranged simply and without any subjective content… Andre’s sculptures tend to hug the ground, an unusual quality in sculpture. They also tend to excite unfavourable comment; abstract art usually does that.

Stone Field Sculpture, which was created in 1977, consists of eight rows of boulders in a triangular shape, so that the first row contains one large boulder, and the eighth row eight smaller boulders. The stones are of local rock, and were chosen so that their composition reflects the makeup of rock in the area. For example, there is the same proportion of basalt to gneiss (metamorphic rock) in the sculpture as there is in the Hartford area. The rows of stone are reminiscent of tombstones, a comparison made clear because Hartford’s Ancient Burying Ground is adjacent to the sculpture.

01 Bigest rock 02 Slightly smaller rocks 03 Slightly smaller rocks etc 04 Slightly smaller rocks etc 05 Slightly smaller rocks etc 06 Slightly smaller rocks etc 07 Slightly smaller rocks etc 08 Slightly smaller rocks etc 36 Rocks

As a major work by an important artist, you would expect Stone Field Sculpture to hold an honoured place in Hartford, but you’d be wrong. The conservative ethic runs deep there, and the work is regarded as something of an embarrassment by many who should know better. Life is like that sometimes – show beauty and meaning in certain ways and it will be missed. If it means you must sit and enjoy it in solitude, the better for you and the worse for them.”

The city even tried to get out of their contract with Andre and not pay him a dime. (This was mostly driven by the popular outcry over the installation.) But once lawyers got involved, the city paid up and there it sits; 36 rocks sitting on the triangularish lawn on Gold Street near Main.

Carl Andre

Carl Andre

September 16, 1935 (age 83) Born Quincy, MA

Nationality American

Education , Andover, MA

Known for Sculpture

Movement

Spouse(s) (1985)

sculpture '43 Roaring forty' by Carl Andre at Kröller-Müller Museum, 1968. Netherlands

Sculpture 'Weathering Way' by Carl Andre at Museum Middelheim, 2001

Carl Andre (born September 16, 1935) is an American minimalist artist and recognized for his ordered linear format and grid format sculptures. His sculptures range from large public artworks (such as Stone Field Sculpture, 1977 in Hartford, CT[1] and Lament for the Children, 1976[2] in Long Island City, NY) to more intimate tile patterns arranged on the floor of an exhibition space (such as 144 Lead Square, 1969[3] or Twenty-fifth Steel Cardinal, 1974). In 1988, Andre was tried and acquitted in the death of his wife, artist Ana Mendieta. Early life

Andre was born in Quincy, MA. He completed primary and secondary schooling in the Quincy public school system and studied art at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA from 1951 to 1953.[4] While at Phillips Academy he became friends with who would later influence Andre's radical approach to sculpture through their conversations about art[5] and through introductions to other artists.[6]

Andre served in the U.S. Army in North Carolina 1955–56 and moved to New York City in 1956. While in New York, Frampton introduced Andre to Constantin Brâncuși through whom Andre became re-acquainted with a former classmate from Phillips Academy, , in 1958. Andre shared studio space with Stella from 1958 through 1960.[6] Career

Andre's early work in wood may have been inspired by Brâncuși, but his conversations with Stella about space and form led him in a different direction. While sharing a studio with Stella, Andre developed a series of wooden "cut" sculptures[5] (such as Radial Arm Saw cut sculpture, 1959, and Maple Spindle Exercise, 1959). Stella is noted as having said to Andre (regarding hunks of wood removed from Andre's sculpture) "Carl, that's sculpture, too."[7]

From 1960 to 1964 Andre worked as freight brakeman and conductor in New Jersey for the Pennsylvania Railroad. The experience with blue collar labor and the ordered nature of conducting freight trains would have a later influence on Andre's sculpture and artistic personality. For example, it was not uncommon for Andre to dress in overalls and a blue work shirt, even to the most formal occasions."[4]

During this period, Andre focused mainly on writing and there is little notable sculpture on record between 1960 and 1965. The poetry would resurface later, most notably in a book (finally published in 1980 by NYU press) called 12 Dialogues in which Andre and Hollis Frampton took turns responding to one another at a typewriter using mainly poetry and free-form essay-like texts.[5] Andre's concrete poetry has exhibited in the United States and Europe, a comprehensive collection of which is in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.[8]

In 1965 he had his first public exhibition of work in the Shape and Structure show curated by at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.[9]

Andre's controversial Lever was included in the seminal 1966 show at the Jewish Museum in New York entitled Primary Structures.

In 1969 Andre helped organize the Art Workers Coalition.

In 1970 he had a solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

In 1972, Britain's Gallery acquired Andre's Equivalent VIII, an arrangement of firebricks. The piece was exhibited several times without incident, but became the center of controversy in 1976 after being featured in an article in The Sunday Times and later being defaced with blue food dye. The "Bricks controversy" became one of the most famous public debates in Britain about contemporary art.[10][11] Quotes of the artist

- "I realized the wood was better before I cut it, than after. I did not improve it in any way."[2] [quote, c. 1959; when Andre was making his sculpture 'The Last Ladder' - "Well sure, my sculptures are floor pieces. Each one, like any area on the surface of the earth, supports a column of air that weighs – what is it? 14.7 pounds per square inch. So in a sense, that might represent a column. It's not an idea, it's a sense of something you know, a demarked place.. .I have nothing to do with Conceptual art. I'm not interested in ideas..".[3] [quote in a talk with the audience, Dec. 1969] - "We live in a world of replicas, and I try desperately in a world of replicas to produce things that are not replicas of anything."[4] [quote of Andre in an interview, 1972] - "Up to a certain time I was cutting into things. Then I realized that the thing I was cutting was the cut. Rather than cut into the material, I now use the material as the cut in space."[5] [quote, between 1965-1977] - "My work is atheistic, materialistic and communistic. It's atheistic because it's without transcendent form, without spiritual or intellectual quality. Materialistic because it's made out of its own materials without pretension to other materials. And communistic because the form is equally accessible to all men."[6] [quote, before 1977] - "Actually my ideal piece of sculpture is a road."[7] [quote, before 1977] Criticism

The gradual evolution of consensus about the meaning of Carl Andre's art can be found in About Carl Andre: Critical Texts Since 1965, published by Ridinghouse in 2008. The most significant essays and exhibition reviews have been collated into one volume, including texts written by some of the most influential art historians and critics: , Donald Kuspit, Lucy R. Lippard, Robert C. Morgan, and Roberta Smith.

He is represented by the in New York, by Konrad Fischer Galerie in Düsseldorf and Berlin, by Sadie Coles HQ in London, and Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris. Personal life

Ana Mendieta's death

In 1979 Andre first met artist Ana Mendieta through a mutual friendship with artists Leon Golub and at AIR Gallery in New York City.[4] Andre and Mendieta eventually married in 1985, but the relationship ended in tragedy.[12] Mendieta fell to her death from Andre's 34th story apartment window in 1985 after an argument with Andre. There were no eyewitnesses. A doorman in the street below had heard a woman screaming "No, no, no, no," before Mendieta's body landed on the roof of a building below. Andre had what appeared to be fresh scratches on his nose and forearm, and his story to the police differed from his recorded statements to the 911 operator an hour or so earlier. The police arrested him.[13]

Andre was charged with second degree murder. He elected to be tried before a judge with no jury. In 1988 Andre was acquitted of all charges related to Mendieta's death.[14] Artist books

Quincy, 1973. Artist book by Carl Andre which features commissioned photographs of landscapes and monuments in his hometown of Quincy, . Quincy was originally printed in conjunction with Andre's 1973 solo show at Addison Gallery. Reprinted by Primary Information in 2014.

America Drill, 2003, Les Maîtres de Forme Contemporains, mfc-michèle didier and Paula Cooper Gallery. Limited edition of 100 numbered, signed and stamped copies, 400 numbered copies and 100 artist's proofs.[15] Bibliography

About Carl Andre: Critical Texts Since 1965, 2008, published by Ridinghouse .

 Busch, Julia M. (1974). A Decade of Sculpture: the New Media in the 1960s. London: Associated University Presses. ISBN 0-87982-007-1.  Christel Sauer: Carl Andre: Cuts, DE/EN, Basel 2011, ISBN 978-3-905777-10-9  Rider, Alistair. Carl Andre: Things in their Elements. London: Phaidon Press, 2011.

 Carl Andre  American Sculptor  Movements and Styles: Minimalism, Conceptual Art  Born: September 16, 1935 - Quincy, Massachusetts

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

 Synopsis Key Ideas Most Important Art Biography & Legacy Influences and Connections Resources

 "My art springs from my desire to have things in the world which would otherwise never be there."

  QUOTES  1 of 5

 SUMMARY

 During the 1960s and 1970s, Carl Andre produced a number of sculptures which are now counted among the most innovative of his generation. Along with figures such as , Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Eva Hesse and Robert Morris, Andre played a central role in defining the nature of Minimalist Art. His most significant contribution was to distance sculpture from processes of carving, modeling, or constructing, and to make works that simply involved sorting and placing. Before him, few had imagined that sculpture could consist of ordinary, factory-finished raw materials, arranged into straightforward configurations and set directly on the ground. In fact, during the 1960s and 1970s many of his low-lying, segmented works came to redefine for a new generation of artists the very nature of sculpture itself.

 KEY IDEAS

 Andre is a sculptor who neither carves into substances, nor models forms. His work involves the positioning of raw materials - such as bricks, blocks, ingots, or plates. He uses no fixatives to hold them in place. Andre has suggested that his procedure for building up a sculpture from small, regularly-shaped units is based on "the principle of masonry construction" - like stacking up bricks to build a wall.

 Andre claims that his sculpture is an exploration of the properties of matter, and for this reason he has called himself a "matterist." Some people have seen his art as "concept based," as though each piece is merely the realization of an idea. But for Andre, this is mistaken: the characteristics of every unit of material he selects, and the arrangement and position of the sculpture in its environment, forms the substance of his art.

 Andre insists on installing all new work in person, and his configurations are always carefully attuned to the scale and proportions of their immediate surroundings. However, once installed, his sculptures can be dismantled and reconstructed in other locations without his direct involvement.

 In 1966, Andre began to describe his work as "sculpture as place," a phrase which alludes both to the fact that his sculptures are produced simply by positioning units on the floor, and to their "place generating" properties. Andre defined "place" as "an area within an environment which has been altered in such a way as to make the general environment more conspicuous."

 After school, Andre briefly attended Kenyon College in Ohio, but soon dropped out. He spent the next few months working in Quincy, and between 1955 and 1956 he completed his military service at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. In 1957 he moved to New York with the intent of devoting more time to writing poetry and making art. Living in Lower Manhattan, his circle of friends included Hollis Frampton and the painter Frank Stella, both of whom had also attended Phillips Academy. Frampton introduced Andre to the poetry and essays of Ezra Pound, and it was through Pound that Andre became increasingly interested in the work of the sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. Stimulated by the Romanian modernist, Andre began to experiment with found blocks of wood, sawing and carving them into simple geometric shapes.

Important Art by Carl Andre

The below artworks are the most important by Carl Andre - that both overview the major creative periods, and highlight the greatest achievements by the artist

Artwork Images

Cedar Piece (1959 (destroyed), remade

1964) Artwork description & Analysis: Andre recreated this sculpture for the exhibition "Nine Young Artists" at the Hudson River Museum in 1964, and it became the first work of his to be exhibited in public. It consists of equal lengths of standard lumber, into which he has cut simple woodworker's joints so that the sculpture can be slotted together, and then detached for the purposes of portability. The initial version dates from 1959 when he was in close contact with Stella and was observing Stella complete his paintings using repeated, even brushstrokes. Cedar Piece can be understood as Andre's early attempt to construct sculpture in a similar fashion, also by building up a form from identical units. Andre liked this approach because once he had established the initial premise, he did not have to make any further decisions about the formal composition of the sculpture. In fact, it could be argued that the sculpture composes itself, in that the shape of the St Andrews cross formed by the ends of the beams results from the regular positioning of the joints. Cedar - Oeffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Switzerland

Equivalent I-VIII (1966) Artwork description & Analysis: Andre frequently works in series,

producing an entire exhibition of sculptures from different Artwork Images arrangements of the same material, as he did for his influential exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York in 1966. Here, each work consists of an equivalent number of white sand-lime bricks (120), although the eight stacks are all arranged according to a different rectangular formation. These eight sculptures are arguably the first sculptures that clearly demonstrate Andre's definition of "sculpture as place." By spreading out the bricks over the floor of the gallery, Andre wanted to generate a sense of extreme horizontality, reminiscent of the level of water. This led him to consider the layer of space between the sculptures to be just as substantial as the bricks themselves, and to emphasise this feature of the sculpture he coined the aphorism: "a thing is a hole in a thing it is not." However, at the end of the exhibition this feature of the installation was lost, because each sculpture was sold individually. Perhaps for this reason Andre remade a version of this work in 1995 called Sand- Lime Instar, in which the entire installation is considered a single sculpture. Sand-lime bricks - Different Museums and Private Collections

Spill (Scatter Piece) (1966)

Artwork description & Analysis: Andre has always claimed that he looks to the properties of an Artwork Images individual unit or module to determine how it should be combined with others, and since these small plastic counters were too light and too small to be set down one by one like tiles in a mosaic, he decided merely to empty a canvas bag of them over the floor. This work became extremely important for defining "process art", a term which artists and critics used in the late 1960s to distinguish recent works which did not seem to fit with definitions of Minimal art. Minimalism was often associated with sculptures which had rigid, clearly defined geometric forms, and yet artists were increasingly producing objects which appeared simply to have been scattered, or dropped, or were made from materials which had no fixed shape. These sculptures were consequently described in terms of "process," as a way of highlighting that the procedure deployed for the construction of the piece was more important than the finished form. Plastic blocks and canvas bag - Kimiko and John Powers

References

1. ^ Hartford Advocate November 13, 1997 "Twenty Years After Stone Field Sculpture shook the Insurance City, Carl Andre Returns" by Patricia Rosoff [1] 2. ^ "Art Galleries on artnet". 3. ^ "144 Lead Square". 4. ^ Jump up to: a b c Naked by the Window, by Robert Katz published 1990 by The Atlantic Monthly Free Press ISBN 0-87113-354-7 5. ^ Jump up to: a b c 12 Dialogues, Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton 1962–1963 published by Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Press and New York University Press, edited by Benjamin HD Buchloh ISBN 0-8147-0579-0 6. ^ Jump up to: a b Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, edited by James Meyer, published 2004 by Yale University Press ISBN 0-300-10590-8, ISBN 978-0-300-10590-2 7. ^ Naked by the Window, by Robert Katz, published 1990 by The Atlantic Monthly Free Press ISBN 0-87113-354-7 8. ^ "CARL ANDRE". 9. ^ "Oral history interview with Carl Andre, 1972 Sept". Research collections. Archives of American Art. 2011. Retrieved June 17, 2011. 10. ^ John Walker. (1999). "Carl Andre's 'pile of bricks'- Tate Gallery acquisition controversy – 1976". Art & outrage/artdesigncafe. Retrieved December 23, 2011. 11. ^ "[ARCHIVED CONTENT] Archive Journeys: Tate History – People, The Public – Tate". Archived from the original on 2013-08-02. 12. ^ https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/sep/22/ana-mendieta-artist-work-foretold- death 13. ^ Patrick, Vincent (June 10, 1990). "A Death in the Art World". The New York Times. Retrieved July 27, 2013. 14. ^ Sullivan, Ronald (February 12, 1988). "Greenwich Village Sculptor Acquitted of Pushing Wife to Her Death". The New York Times. Retrieved April 28, 2010. 15. ^ "mfc-michèle didier – Home"